This is the joint website of Women Against Rape and Black Women's Rape Action Project. Both organisations are based on self-help and provide support, legal information and advocacy. We campaign for justice and protection for all women and girls, including asylum seekers, who have suffered sexual, domestic and/or racist violence.

WAR was founded in 1976. It has won changes in the law, such as making rape in marriage a crime, set legal precedents and achieved compensation for many women. BWRAP was founded in 1991. It focuses on getting justice for women of colour, bringing out the particular discrimination they face. It has prevented the deportation of many rape survivors. Both organisations are multiracial.

Burundi

I won the right to stay after four long years of fighting even to get my asylum case heard. My four children were lost in Burundi where I was forced to leave them when I fled for my life after being imprisoned, raped and tortured. Any spare penny that I had since coming to the UK was spent looking for my children. When I won the right to stay I renewed my efforts. I found a reliable man who has some experience in detective work who was ready to search. In July 2008, he located three of them in Uganda.

At first, contact with my children was very difficult. They were deeply traumatised by being separated from me for so long. For all those years they hadn’t known if I was alive or dead. With the help of Women Against Rape, I am applying for settlement visas for the children to join me. We are waiting for the outcome of their applications.

“ Many of you may be familiar with my story but in case you aren’t I tell some of it here. In November 2007, I won the right to stay after four long years of fighting even to get my asylum case heard. My four children were lost in Burundi where I was forced to leave them when I fled for my life after being imprisoned, raped and tortured.

OCTOBER 2007 As a result of this financial appeal, Ms M raised enough money so that a reliable person could start looking for her children. He eventually found them in Uganda in July 2008.

ACTION ALERT: DONATIONS NEEDED TO HELP TRAUMATISED MOTHER FIND HER CHILDREN

Ms Maureen Mahoro has not seen or heard from her four children for over four years. She doesn’t know whether they are alive or dead but like any mother is desperate to find out. Her oldest son disappeared and she was forced to leave the other three behind when she fled from Burundi to the UK in fear of her life in 2003. She needs money to search for them and all the money she managed to scrap together for this purpose has run out. We are urgently asking for your help.

Oona King, MP who chairs the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on the Great Lakes Region and Genocide Prevention, met with a delegation of over forty women from All African Women’s Group. Organised by Black Women’s Rape Action Project and Women Against Rape, rape survivors from Burundi, Congo Brazzaville, Congo DRC, Kenya and Uganda were able to speak powerfully, movingly and with great courage about what forced them to seek asylum in Britain. Every woman said that the arms trade was one of the crucial issues. A woman from Uganda said “For anyone to arrive here is so hard, it’s a lot of struggle to get here. The British government has a policy, since 1981, of backing Museveni. There’d be no raping and killings in the DRC, Rwanda or any of these places if this support did not happen. We wouldn’t have to come here to seek asylum. But nobody condemns Museveni. Why are we not entitled to asylum then? ”